Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Back to real work today. I finally finished the photometry for the first of 9 frames. However, in the analysis, it seems that the routine missed ~2-5% of the light from each star it was trying to subtract out. Apparently this is a huge uncertainty. Thus, the next 6 hours were spent adjusting settings, trying to get to less than 1%.

Fortunately, Dr. Sandquist has provieded me with another computer script that did what I was doing manually, in an hour, in about 3 minutes. However, dispite the program outputting the subtracted images more rapidly, the large majority of that 6 hours was comparing the outputted images to the original to see exactly how much light was leftover. Either that or cursing that IRAF for losing my cursor.

Sadly, no matter how much I played with the settings, we didn't seem to be able to get it below 2%. At about 6:00 I finally gave up for the day and headed off to dinner. Surprisingly, everything was edible. Horay for old people! Boo for the swarms of children monopolizing the game room and TVs.